Laura R Langhoff Arndt

Gospel and Acts Reading Plan & Workbook Laura R Langhoff Arndt

Students need to know what the Bible says before they can truly think about it. They need to understand it in context to grasp God's loving relationship with His people and what that looks like. One challenge is that the Bible is long and contains some difficult books for middle school students to read. In this program the Bible is broken into 3 parts: Old Testament, Gospels and Acts, and Paul's Journeys and the Epistles. Due to the breadth of the Old Testament, the readings are developed from the 70 Most Important Events in the Bible. Due to the redundancy of the synoptic gospels, the readings are taken from portions of each gospel with the similar passages in other books noted. Because John is different in both tone and events, it is singled out and studied on its own. As the epistles are written during the missionary journeys of Paul, they are included in their own workbook along with those journeys. Until this point, students have heard and talked about the gospel accounts in Sunday School, but have never had the opportunity to read about Jesus ministry. The Level I course, Gospels and Acts Bible Reading Plan for middle school/confirmation, is a one year, 33 week course. The questions are primarily written to give students an understanding of what Jesus was telling the people. One needs to remember that moving from fulfilling laws to having Jesus fulfill the law was quite a change for the Israelites. Students should be able to relate the events of Jesus' ministry back to the educator with accuracy, be able to discuss the events, as well as to be able to apply what they know about them in different ways. The questions are not meant to be all encompassing or theological in nature. They are meant to get students thinking about what they are reading and what's happening in each account.